Last night I was informed that my dear friend is going to go on a diet to lose twenty pounds by the end of the year.

Before I had a chance to let my brain engage, my mouth said “Oh, I’ll go on the diet with you. I’d like to lose another twenty pounds.”

I hate dieting. Almost as much a I hate exercising. Dont like that E word … at all. Not even a little bit.

Over the course of my life I have been on many diets. Back when I was engaged I went on Weight Watchers and lost the ten pounds or so that I had to lose … and became a Lifetime Member. This entitles me to go back to WW whenever I want, hanging my head, and be reminded that I am nowhere near my goal weight … but if I want to weigh and measure … and pay … and go to meetings …

Along with many return trips.

I also had some success on Nutri-Systems eating plan after the birth of my first daughter. I had fifty pounds to lose. I bought. I ate. I lost. Worked great until I added carbs back into my world.

In the form of cheese puffs as I recall.

The most successful combination was after the birth of my second daughter, in which I ate a healthy breakfast, a small piece of broiled fish for lunch, drank lots of water, and lean meat and vegetables for dinner. Add to that the fact that I nursed the baby for months and months … and rode a stationary bike for about two or three hours a day while watching television.

That E word again.

Turns out there is some truth to what they say.

Seems to me there was another cardboard food diet in there somewhere, too. But not for too long. And of course the Quick Weight Loss / Quick Inches Off / Phyicians / Zone / Blood Type / Grapefruit / Skinny Soup diets. With limited success.

A good breakup was always good for me to lose many pounds. One friend said he could always tell when I was in the post-relationship part of life … I lost a ton of weight.

But really, who can eat when you feel sad like that?

I always wanted the kind of diet where you thought really hard about being thinner, went to sleep, and woke up at your ideal weight.

Not that twenty pounds gets me there … but it would be close.

It was not enough that I had lost over twice that much last year … actually starting the year before.

In a nutshell, I had reached a life-altering moment in which I realized that life would not go on forever. Cancer does that to people. Well, it wasn’t like really bad cancer … more like “we got it all” cancer … but it still caused me to do some hard thinking.

And I made some choices … or more accurately, I took a hard look at choices I had already made in life.

And I did not like some of them.

So I began to back out of a long-term relationship … and eat healthier. This was two years ago.

The plan then was easy enough. Eat less. Eat healthy. Oh, and hardly and sugar unless it is in fruits or my morning coffee.

And I lost tons of weight.

I have gained a little of that weight back over the course of this year … heartbreak notwithstanding … and really do want to knock it back off. And more.

So I am sitting here munching on my salad for dinner … and thinking of the rest of the ice cream that sits in the freezer downstairs.